Swedish Teens Organize After Neo-Nazi Intrusion
Members of a Swedish youth movement launched an anti-Fascist campaign at a high school where neo-Nazis interrupted a lecture by a Holocaust survivor.
The campaign began last week at the Peders Skrivares high school in the western province of Halland, where on April 22 a group of skinheads demonstratively walked in on a talk given to students by Mietek Grocher, 89, Sveriges Radio reported.
The campaign had members of the SSU youth movement of the center-left Swedish Social Democratic Party set up a booth in the school, located in the city of Varberg, and holding signs reading “Sieg Heil – Hell No.”
At least six neo-Nazis in their 20s entered the room where Grocher was speaking and began taking pictures of the listeners. They did not behave violently.
Grocher said he was used to such disturbances during his public lectures on the Holocaust.
Earlier this month, a leader of the far-right Sweden Democrats party, Richard Jomshof, told the Expressen daily that he does “not consider the Jewish minority as a problem because the Jewish community is so small.”
He also condemned anti-Semitism as rooted in envy of Jews and expressed support for Israel.
Sweden Democrats, accused by opponents of promoting Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, more than doubled its gains in the 2014 parliamentary elections, which left the party with 49 seats out of 349 in the Riksdag, the kingdom’s parliament.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO